Newtown Families Vow Lifelong Mission

First a bit about the parents, then the gun-control ideas they’re putting forth – because it’s important to look at those ideas by themselves. It’s also important to note the difference between addressing the ideas, which I harshly criticize (gun control leads to tyranny large and small, not safety), as opposed to the parents themselves, who everyone can empathize with in their grief. For all the empathy shared with the parents, the difficulty lies in the “solutions” they are putting forward, and the people pushing them to those “solutions”.

Bill Sherlach: This is– this is a marathon. And you have to be prepared to run all 26 miles. This is not a sprint. That’s been the typical reaction. Get the legislation. Get it now. And then it– it fades. Time goes by. News cycles happen. Other headlines come up. Now when you take a multifaceted approach, and you can build a wagon big enough for a grassroots movement to get involved, it has the legs to go the 26 miles.

Scott Pelley: This is a lifelong pursuit for all of you?

Voices: Yes. Yeah.

Bill Sherlach: Shame on me if it’s not.

Despite the highly political-machine nature of that first statement, I’m going to hope that it’s still their continued grief that’s driving them, and err on the side of empathy – and thus why I’m only criticizing their ideas and not them, but very bluntly, they are pushing for greater state authority, weakened rights for citizens, and they’re ultimately pushing for tyranny. I don’t think they necessarily even understand that they are, and I’m not even sure they can understand that if their grief is so great. I hope that for many of them, it’s just their grief driving them, but they are declaring that a “lifelong pursuit” to work against a key fixture of the Bill of Rights has become their goal.

By contrast, Dr. Suzanna Hupp, whose parents were murdered along with 21 other people in the Luby’s Massacre, did understand that taking the horns from the gazelle does not protect the gazelle from the lion. Losing two parents in a massacre that you have to escape from yourself isn’t the same as losing children to a massacre, but it is quite a parallel.

For someone else not as clear-headed as Mattioli, struggling through grief, and for someone from an urbanized, liberal, extremely wealthy state like Connecticut, they probably don’t have much connection to firearms through sporting, self-defense, or hunting traditions (unless they work at Colt or one of the other Connecticut arms makers), and so they probably don’t view it as a right, but just as a horrible thing that took their child away. A thing that some caricature of a person they don’t understand in a flyover state cares about – but whose words they don’t or can’t hear. A thing that flyover state caricature needs to be taught about by people like them so the flyover state caricature can understand it’s a horrible thing. A thing that flyover state caricature needs to have taken away for the collective good of all children because that thing killed their kids.

It’s tragic and it’s altogether understandable, given what they’ve been through.

To them, it doesn’t matter that it was a madman (thus also forgoing the complex issues of how to deal with madmen), it becomes the piece of plastic and metal that did it, it becomes that thing of so-called rights and guns and all that horrible thing they blame for the loss of their child. By their region and culture, they’re already politically predisposed at best to apathy towards the Second Amendment, and now they blame the rights of free men and women for the deaths of their children because it’s a horrible thing to them, and that’s all they can feel through their grief.

I feel for the parents, I can understand why they do what they do, but at the same time, they don’t understand what they’re asking for, and they don’t understand who is pushing them to these demands. They don’t understand the consequences of their anti-gun, anti-rights, anti-freedom, pro-state actions. If they got all they’re asking for, they’d find they’d leave the world a less safe place. In the long run, nothing good comes of citizen disarmament:

Scott Pelley: In terms of the things that are being considered in Washington, are any of them at the top of your priority list? If you could have one thing or you could have two, what would you choose?

Bill Sherlach: Personally, I would– I would think the ma– limiting magazine size and universal background check. If I had to pick two-

Universal background checks are meaningless to criminals who steal guns, and meaningless to madmen or terrorists who up until they time they snap present the image on paper of being upstanding citizens – neuroscience PhD candidates, or Army majors, for example.

Banning magazines is banning a tool. The VA Tech murderer used 10-round magazines in his second pistol – a Walther P22 – and he murdered more adults than the Sandy Hook murderer did children with two pistols and a rifle with no 10-round cap. And on the other end of the evil-good spectrum, New York has already passed a ban on everything above 7 rounds – limiting you to seven chances only to save your life in a confrontation.

Dana Loesch, when ripping Piers Morgan a new one, showed how magazine-limitation logic works. To them, 30 rounds means 30 dead kids, and they want to go to 10 rounds, to “save” 20 kids. Of course that means that 10 dead kids must be acceptable. So then they want to 7 rounds to “save” 23 kids, but that means 7 dead kids is acceptable. So really they want to go to 0 rounds to “save” all the kids. And that means total disarmament – which is what anti-rights tyrants want; and is something that ultimately leaves entire nations – adults and kids – defenseless. There are huge consequences to citizen disarmament.

And then there’s this idea, which would have made no difference in Newtown:

Nicole Hockley: And anything that helps reduce– gun trafficking as well, in the straw purchases, to know that you can’t buy a gun for someone else.

The Terry family wants somebody to go after gun traffickers, but Eric Holder hasn’t gone to prison for sending thousands of guns to Mexico. I have yet to hear the media (beyond the politically attuned right and Sharyl Attkisson, anyway) complain about the hundreds of dead brownkids killed next door by guns sent to narcoterrorist cartels by the US government.

Straw purchasing is already illegal. You can’t make it “double illegal”, and criminals by their nature as lawbreakers do not care. You could ask that the Obama administration enforce gun laws against criminals, which they aren’t.

The parents have an entire political caste that is pro-tyranny that’s willing to use them as props and tell them that guns killed their kids and use them to support an anti-rights agenda. A mother in a Newtown situation who’s distraught over the loss of a child doesn’t care about straw purchases, because if every straw purchase past, present, and future never happened, it still wouldn’t save her kid. She’d know that in so many mass killings, it’s done by madmen who aren’t known to law enforcement, and who thus don’t care about straw purchases because they don’t make straw purchases. After dealing with her sadness and grief, she’d get past the powerful feeling of loss and see that it’s nothing but a political ploy for greater control by the state that cold never bring her child back.

A father who lost his child wouldn’t care about 6 bullets or 10 or 30, because if his child was killed by the first bullet, it wouldn’t make a difference. Wishing away every magazine over 10 rounds wouldn’t save his kid if his kid was one of those first 10 rounds. He’d have to wish away the rest of them as well – hence why NY has a 7-round ban, and other states have pushed for 5. Ultimately, those who oppose citizens’ rights are going for zero – which the father, after dealing with his grief – may well understand isn’t in any way a good thing. It wouldn’t bring back his child, but it would endanger others against tyranny by an individual madman or by a powerful state.

Parents who want to do something about gun trafficking should be asking Obama why he exerted executive privilege on Fast and Furious. They’re riding on Air Force One with him – they can ask him personally. In their grief, and perhaps because they’ve given the issue little thought until having it thrust upon them, they are either steered away from those questions or don’t even know to ask them. They’re in mourning, but are being used.

The parents are not being helped to heal, they’re being used as political props. They’re repeating anti-rights, anti-gun, pro-tyranny messages that they’ve been fed by a political caste. Their grief is being flown around the country to be showcased so the left can push its agenda. The parents are lost in grief and with the media spotlight, are pushing for something to make sense of what’s lost. They’re trying to make their children into something greater by providing a lasting legacy – and they mean well – but in their grief, they don’t look at the long run. They don’t look at the greater consequences of the things they’re asking for. They’re surrounded by political operatives who want to use them to “never let a crisis go to waste” and push for gun control on the backs of their dead children that could never make it through otherwise.

[…] few days ago, I wrote about how a few of the Newtown families have taken on a lifelong mission, and then yesterday about how reports came out that some of those families have actively decided to […]